I was wondering if there is any controls.dat type of info available for consoles?

Specifically: I'm looking to find a list of games from the N64/PS1 and newer that DON'T use or DON'T need the analog stick.

I have a cab with a pair of 8-way joysticks and 8 buttons per player and I'd like to feature games from the N64/PS1 and newer consoles but I want to be able to exclude anything that relies on the Analog stick. That way the Front end only lists games that will actually work properly with my controls.

So far I've determined that 100% of Sega Saturn games are designed to work with a d-pad only as Sega made this a requirement for developers. I've debated play testing every game in the N64 and Dreamcast sets as they have a relatively small number of total games (at least for US releases)...

The Analog sticks on the PS1 weren't available until November of 1997 so anything released before that would be safe... However the rest of the PS1, PS2, GameCube and Wii seems like a daunting task to figure out manually without having some way to automate the non-analog game finding process.

Using RomLister with controls.dat for MAME was able to get me a list of Arcade games well suited for my machine, I'd like to be able to do something similar with consoles.

I could also see this being useful for generating list of:-games that can be played with just light guns (for light gun cabs)-games that can be played with just a steering wheel controller (for racing cabs)-games that can be played with a mouse (for trackball support)-games that support more than 2 players at the same time (for 4 player cabs)etc.

I went through the N64 years ago. There are only a couple N64 titles that truly used the D-pad for directional. Rampage, a few puzzles like Tetris and Dr. Mario, game show games like jeopardy or that south park one, and a couple fighters like mortal kombat and fighters destiny. That being said, there were a lot more games that you could substitute 8-way on the controls with no loss. For example, Worms Armageddon, a port of a very non-analog game, will not allow use of the d-pad for directional, but the controls are set to the analog stick only. Even a number of 3D games analog were fine because the analog was not developed as a finesse of the game. We are talking 3D gaming at an early stage.

I agree with Vigo. most N64 games use the stick as its movement. just think of the analog stick on the N64 as an arcade stick. because of the design of the controller i dont know of any game that uses both the d pad and the stick.

Working on an app to map console games to rigs. Integrates with CPWizard. Part of this will be creating database of all controllers (to map default game functions against) - so sure! If you're interested, would welcome the help on that! Hard to explain it, so some screenies:

I would think default Controls would be easy just look at a popular arcade stick and copy it button config for that console. Thats how i setup my xinmo for ps3. Copied hori button layout. Im more than willing to put some time into some games to help get control setups going.